Ellen Harrison
Composer

Born and raised in Illinois, Ellen Harrison received her doctorate in composition from the University of California, Berkeley, where her teachers included Edwin Dugger, Richard Felciano, Andrew Imbrie and Olly Wilson. Supported by U.C. Berkeley's Prix de Paris, she spent two years studying in Paris, also attending composer workshops in electronic music at the prestigious Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique, better known as IRCAM. In addition she has studied with Milko Kelemen at the Musikhochschule in Stuttgart, and with Thomas Frederickson and Paul Zonn at the University of Illinois, producing a corpus of works for all manner of instrumental and vocal ensembles.

Harrison has a love for evocative language and evocative sounds. San Francisco Contemporary Music Players audiences may remember the 2001 performance of her sprightly and capricious septet Seven Devilish Pieces (1996), whose manifold musical ideas sprang from a linguistic pun in French: "this [cette] devilish piece" became "seven [sept] devilish pieces," in a process of infernal multiplication. Multiple, too, are the textures and gestures of these seven movements, which run the gamut from the icy calm of "Put Those Devils to Rest" to the frenzy of the finale, "Hot Times," which bears the Shakespearean epigraph: "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here."

Almost all of Harrison's scores have similarly memorable, though not always comic, underpinnings. Sporting such whimsical movement titles as "Masks of Regret" and "The Furies Unleashed," her chamber work Masques et Visages (2000, premiered by members of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra), seems to dip into distant and antique sonic realms to portray what she describes as "a series of contrasting characters much like the many and varied expressions of the masks one might see at a Venetian masked ball." By contrast, Cite du Globe Captif (City of the Captive Globe) takes its title from an architectural project by Rem Koolhaas, which focused on urban life in New York City and was meant depict "the capital of Ego, where science, art, poetry and forms of madness complete under ideal conditions to invent, destroy and restore the world of phenomenal reality." And most recently, her award-winning String Quartet no. 1, Shifting Landscapes, pays tribute to the memory of her mother in what a critic for the Boston Globe described as "music of mingled grief, remembrance, and celebration."

Harrison's music has been performed in both the United States and Europe, and her works have received numerous honors and awards from organizations such as June in Buffalo, The Aspen Music School, the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, the American Guild of Organists, the Fromm Music Foundation, IBLA European International Competition for Composers, and the Ohio Arts Council. Shifting Landscapes was performed by the Empyrean Ensemble at the University of California Davis, and by the Lydian String Quartet on a Festival of Women Composers at Brandeis University given in honor of composer Rebecca Clarke. Harrison is currently writing a quartet for strings (violin, viola, cello, and bass) commissioned by double bass player Matt Zory, of the Cincinnati Symphony, and tentatively titled Herbstzeitlose. Harrison teaches theory and composition at the University of Cincinnati, College Conservatory of Music Preparatory Department.

- Beth E. Levy

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